Thoughts on Money

"I just found this hammer. What should I do with it?"

Kind of a weird question, right? But it's just like asking "What should I do with this money?"

Well, uh...I dunno. That's not nearly enough information.

A hammer is a tool.

Money is a tool.

You have to get clear on what you're trying to accomplish in life before anyone can tell you what to do with... See more

Neither he nor the others feel that the hunched shoulders and housing insecurity of their youth were good for their art. The “La Bohème” portrait of impoverished painters and poets was after all a description, not a prescription. “And at least they could afford the garret,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “In New York, forget it.”

Risk isn’t a measure of negative consequences. It’s a measure of uncertainty. And the issue with minimizing risk is that while we protect our downside, we prevent ourselves from achieving any sort of meaningful upside. In this way, risk minimization isn’t an insurance policy as much as it is a collar, and the cost of protecting our downside is the... See more

Here is one that I’ve encountered time and again: marketing is the mother of revenue. Some of you might wince at the idea of self-promotion and all of your biases with the word marketing. When it comes to gigantic corporations, I do too. But let’s consider this in a small business context, where you work in and with your community. In this sense,... See more

But consumption smoothing pays homage to an existential reality: Life itself is the ultimate scarce asset. The future is unknowable, and religiously maintaining a double-digit savings rate through the worst squalls of life is not of the utmost importance.

We need to remember that the market is not the economy, and the economy is not the market. And the economy makes me very worried about food banks. Children are hungry, people are hungry. And when kids can’t eat they can’t pay attention in school, and if they can’t pay attention in school they can’t be good students; they can’t move forward in the... See more

This is the kind of work we do as financial advisors. We help clients lean into the tension between money and meaning. It’s not about quick answers! It’s about living with the questions long enough to align their money with what truly matters.